Invitation Settings

PaymentWorks initiates connections between Payers and their suppliers by sending an invitation by email to current and prospective suppliers. This document covers the settings available when designing invitations.

Invitation Settings can be found by navigating to the Vendor Master Updates area on the PaymentWorks home screen. From there, click on the New Vendors tab, and choose the Configuration view in the submenu in the upper left corner.

There are two settings when configuring invitations:

Allow Users to Send Invitations Manually

This setting simply allows the “Send Invitation” button to be displayed to any user who has been assigned the Initiate New Vendor Invitations permission. Deactivating this setting would allow Payers to suspend invitations if needed for something like an audit.

Note: the other way to hide the display of the “Send Invitation” button and disable sending invitations would be to uncheck the New Vendor Registration Enabled setting on the General Options tab.

Allow Initiators to Add Personal Messages

Initiators may have the option to add a personal message to the invitations they send out to prospective suppliers. To enable this capability, two things are required:

1. The Allow Initiators to Add Personal Messages setting must be enabled

2. The Invitation Template must include a <PERSONAL_MESSAGE> placeholder field, which will be replaced by the text provided by the initiator. For more on placeholder fields, see the Invitation Template section below.

Note: If Personal Messages have been enabled (step 1 above) without a <PERSONAL_MESSAGE> placeholder field in the invitation template, the initiator will still be able to enter their message, but it will not be delivered to their prospective supplier.

When enabled, adding a personal message to an invitation is optional. It will appear at the bottom of the invitation dialog box.

Invitation Templates

The content of an invitation sent to prospective suppliers is determined by the Invitation Subject Template and the Invitation Mail Template.

Default Templates

There are default values for both templates and reset buttons to enable returning changed values back to the default.

Placeholder Fields

Before describing the invitation templates, it’s useful to clarify the function of placeholder fields in these templates. Placeholder fields are elements in the template that are replaced by actual values at the time the invitation email is created.

So, for example, when the subject or mail template includes <COMPANY_NAME>, that value is replaced by the value in the Company Field of the payer’s account profile. If the company name is “Narragansett University”, then that value will be used wherever the <COMPANY_NAME> placeholder field appears.

These are the placeholder fields available for use in the invitation templates:

• <COMPANY_NAME> will be replaced with your company’s name
• <SUPPLIER_NAME> will be replaced with your supplier’s name, as entered in the “Company/Individual Name field in the invitation dialog box.
• <INITIATOR_NAME> will be replaced with the full name of the user sending the invitation.
• <INITIATOR_EMAIL> will be replaced with the email address of the user sending the invitation.
• <PRIVATE_LANDING_PAGE> will be replaced with a link to a private landing page that will allow your supplier to register as a new vendor. Your template must contain this placeholder value for the invitation to be effective.
• <PERSONAL_MESSAGE> will be replaced with an optional personalized message to the vendor (if enabled, as described above)

Invitation Subject Template

The Invitation Subject Template determines the subject line of the invitation email. Placeholder fields can be used here. The default value is:

In the case where the payer company is “Narragansett University”, the subject line of the invitation email would read:

Subject: Narragansett University – New Vendor Registration

Invitation Mail Template

The body of the invitation email is derived from the Invitation Mail Template and consists of the text in the template and the values dynamically filled in for the placeholder fields.

The content of the default invitation template is shown below.

Formatting

The Invitation Mail Template supports a subset of Markdown, an open standard to specify formatting within a plain text file. Supported formatting commands are as follows:

• Bold: Text surrounded by asterisks, such as: *Bold text*
• Italics: Text surrounded by underscore characters, such as: _Italic text_
• Ordered lists: Number plus period in front of text, such as: 1. Item number one
• Unordered lists: Asterisk in front of text, such as: * First bullet

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks in the template have two components:

• The displayed text comes first, enclosed within brackets
• The destination URL follows, enclosed within parentheses

A hypertext link to Wikipedia, for example, would be written like this:

Resetting to Default

The Invitation Subject Template and the Invitation Mail Template each have a reset button that will allow you to revert the respective settings to their default values.

Checking the Invitation

You can review the expected email at any time by clicking on the Send Preview e-Mail Invitation to Current User button, which will send the invitation to you, as the logged in user, as if you were the supplier recipient.

Note that the landing page will not be active, and no personal message will be included.